A Shameful Life Read online

  ASHAMEFULLIFE

  Osamu Dazai

  Translated from the Japanese

  and with an Afterword by Mark Gibeau

  Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California

  Published by

  Stone Bridge Press

  P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707

  tel 510-524-8732 • [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com

  This publication has received the William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation from the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies Committee on Japanese Studies.

  English translation © 2018 Mark Gibeau.

  Originally published in Japanese as Ningen shikkaku in 1948.

  Except on the cover and title page, Japanese names in this book appear as family-name first.

  Cover design by Linda Ronan incorporating a photograph © Andrés Cañal Cañal. Text design by Peter Goodman.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018

  p-ISBN: 978-1-61172-044-0

  e-ISBN: 978-1-61172-932-0

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  The First Journal

  The Second Journal

  The Third Journal

  Part One

  Part Two

  Epilogue

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  NOTE ON THE CURRENT TRANSLATION

  ASHAMEFULLIFE

  PREFACE

  I’ve seen three pictures of him.

  The first is a photo of what I suppose might be called his childhood days and appears to have been taken when he was about ten years old. He stands at the edge of a garden pond, surrounded on all sides by a crowd of girls (his sisters and cousins, I imagine), dressed in rough-spun, striped hakama trousers, head tilted thirty degrees to the left and with a hideous grin on his face. Hideous? I suppose that the less perceptive (those with no training in aesthetics) might blandly say, “My, what a cute boy.”

  Empty praise perhaps, but the child’s grinning face does possess a hint of what the vulgar call “cuteness,” or at least enough of it to save the remark from crude flattery. Yet anyone with the least experience in aesthetic matters would but glance at the photo before thrusting it away in disgust as though it were a repulsive, hairy caterpillar, muttering, “What an odious child!”

  Truly, the more I gaze at the boy’s grinning face the more an inexplicable, disturbing sense of unease grows in me. Look there—it’s not a smile. There isn’t a trace of a smile on his face. The proof is in his hands, balled into tight fists. People don’t smile with hands clenched in fists. It’s a monkey. A monkey’s grin. The face has simply been twisted into an ugly mass of wrinkles. The expression is so strange, so oddly deformed that I cannot help but recoil in revulsion. I’m tempted to call the figure “Wrinkle Boy.” Never in my life have I seen a child with such a peculiar expression.

  The second photo also reveals a face that has undergone a surprising transformation. He is a student now. It isn’t clear if the picture is from high school or university, but either way he is a startlingly beautiful youth. Yet, oddly, this photo also lacks the feel of a living, breathing person. Dressed in his school uniform, a handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, he is relaxed, legs crossed as he leans back in a rattan chair, and, here too, he is smiling. This time it is not the grin of a wrinkled monkey but a finely crafted smile. Still, somehow, it differs from the smile of a human being. It lacks something. The quiet sobriety of life, perhaps, or the weight of blood. It lacks substance, possessing instead the lightness not of a bird, but of a feather. He is but a blank sheet of paper, smiling. From top to bottom everything feels contrived. This is not mere affectation—that falls far short of the mark. Nor is it just frivolity, flamboyance, or an attempt to appear charming. Clearly, he is not simply trying to appear fashionable. Yet, as I look at the photo more closely I experience a vague disquiet, as if I were reading a ghost story. Never in my life have I seen such a peculiar, beautiful young man.

  The last photo is the most disturbing. I cannot guess his age. His hair is streaked here and there with gray. He sits in the corner of a filthy room (behind him the wall crumbles in three places), warming his hands over a small charcoal brazier. This time he is not smiling. His face is empty of all expression. It is as though he were already dead, even as he sits there with hands held over the brazier. An ominous, inauspicious photo. And that is not the only disturbing element of the picture. He sits so close to the camera that I can make out each element of his face in detail. He possesses an unremarkable brow, with unremarkable wrinkles. Unremarkable eyebrows, unremarkable eyes, unremarkable nose and chin. I give an exasperated sigh. His face isn’t simply absent of expression, it fails to leave any impression at all. Nothing stands out. I gaze at the picture and then close my eyes. It’s gone. I can see the walls and the small charcoal brazier but the face—the “protagonist” of the room—has vanished like mist in the sunlight, and, try though I might, I cannot bring it back. It is an unpaintable face, impossible even to caricature. Then, I open my eyes. I don’t even feel the fleeting joy of recognition. There is no, “Ah, that’s what he looked like!” To be perfectly blunt, I cannot remember what he looks like even as I stare at the photo with eyes wide open. There is only disgust, irritation, and the almost overpowering impulse to look away.

  Even the face of someone slipping into death holds some kind of expression, leaves some kind of mark. But this, maybe this is what it would be like if the head of a carthorse were sewn onto a human body. In any case, a vague sense of revulsion shivers up my spine. Never in my life have I seen a man with such a peculiar face.

  THE FIRST JOURNAL

  I have lived a shameful life.

  I can’t understand how this thing called “human life” is supposed to work. I was born out in the country, in northeast Japan, so I was already fairly old by the time I saw my first steam engine. Back then I didn’t realize that the bridges in the station were there simply to let people cross the tracks and get to their platform. I thought they were there to give the station an air of sophistication and fun—like a playground. I maintained this belief for quite some time, and clambering up and down those stairs always seemed to me the height of refined entertainment. Surely, I thought, this was the most considerate of all the services provided by the railroad. When I eventually discovered that they were nothing more than a practical set of stairs, my sense of delight vanished.

  Another time, when I was a child, I saw an illustration of a subway. It never occurred to me that it might have been designed with some practical purpose in mind. I thought that people must have grown bored with riding above ground and the underground trains were built to provide new and exciting ways to travel.

  I was a sickly child and often confined to my bed. I remember lying there, gazing at the sheets, the pillowcase, the quilt cover and so on, wondering at their insipid designs. It wasn’t until I was nearly twenty years old that I realized that these things actually had a practical purpose, and, yet again, I was grieved by the dismal parsimony of humankind.

  I never knew what it felt like to be hungry. No, I don’t mean my family was so wealthy that I never wanted for the necessities in life—nothing so cliché as that. Rather, I mean I had absolutely no idea what the sensation of hunger felt like. I know it sounds strange, but even when I was hungry, I didn’t know I was hungry. Whenever I got home from elementary or middle school, everyone would exclaim that I must be hungry, they remembered what it was like, they were always starving when they got back from school, and would I like some glazed beans? A bit of ca
ke? Sweet buns? They made such a fuss that my inherent need to please others was roused and, muttering something about being hungry, I’d toss a handful of glazed beans into my mouth, but I never had the slightest inkling of what “hunger” was supposed to feel like.

  Of course I eat—and I eat a lot—but I have almost no memory of eating out of hunger. I like to eat unusual dishes, delicacies. When I go out, I eat everything put before me, even if I have to force it down. That’s why mealtimes at home were truly the most wretched moments of my childhood.

  Ours was an old, country-style house, and at mealtimes the entire household—some ten people—formed two lines facing one another, a small tray set out before each person, and I, being the youngest, naturally sat at the very end of one of those lines in that gloomy dining room. The mere sight of my family, eating their lunch in silence, was enough to send shivers down my spine. Worse still, being a country household, we had the same thing every day. There were no unusual dishes, no delicacies, nor, indeed, any hope of them, so I came to live in terror of mealtimes. Sitting at the very end of that gloomy row of trays, shivering in the cold as I picked up a few grains of rice at a time, shoving them into my mouth, I wondered why people felt compelled to sit down and eat three times a day, every single day. Everyone wore such solemn expressions as they ate that I began to entertain the notion that maybe this was all some kind of ritual. Perhaps, I thought, this was a sort of prayer—this act of gathering in the dreary dining room, all in a row, eyes downcast, three times a day, every day, always at the same time, trays lined up precisely, chewing food in silence whether we wanted it or not. Perhaps it was a ritual to placate the teeming spirits that filled the house.

  When people told me I’d die if I didn’t eat I thought they were just making mean threats. Still, that superstition (even now I can’t help but think of it as such) filled me with dread. People die if they don’t eat, so they work. They have to eat. Nothing seemed more impenetrable, incomprehensible, or menacing to me than this.

  It seems that I will end my days having never understood anything at all about the lives of human beings. I fear my idea of happiness is completely at odds with everyone else’s idea of happiness. This fear consumes me, sometimes making me twist and turn at night, groaning in agony, driving me to the brink of madness. Am I happy? Ever since I was a small child people have been telling me how fortunate I am, but, for my part, I felt like I was in hell, and the ones saying I was fortunate seemed incomparably and immeasurably happier than I was.

  I was so miserable I sometimes thought I’d been afflicted with a dozen curses, any single one of which could crush the life out of a normal person.

  In the end, I just don’t understand. I cannot understand the kind or degree of suffering that other people experience. Perhaps their “practical” suffering, the kind relieved by eating, is in fact the most extreme form of suffering—perhaps it is a suffering so ghastly, like the tortures of the deepest circles of hell, that my “dozen curses” pale to insignificance beside it. I don’t know. Yet, if that were the case, how do they endure it? How do they make it through each day without succumbing, without despairing, without committing suicide, even as they go on arguing about politics? Could they be such thoroughgoing egotists, so certain that this is the way things are supposed to be, that they have never once doubted themselves? If so, I suppose it might be easier to bear. I wonder if that is simply the way human beings are and that that is what makes them happy. I just don’t know. . . . I wonder if they sleep soundly at night, if they awake refreshed in the morning. What do they dream about? What are they thinking about when they are walking down the street? Money? Surely that can’t be the only thing. I recall someone saying that people live to eat, but I’ve never heard anyone say that people live for money. Yet, in the right circumstances . . . But, no, I don’t understand that either. . . . The more I think about it, the less I understand and the more I find myself assailed by the terrifying, disquieting idea that I alone am utterly different. I can barely talk to people. I have no idea what to say or how to say it.

  That’s when I hit upon the idea of the clown.

  It was to be my final attempt at courting humanity. Even though I lived in abject terror of people, I couldn’t abandon them entirely. So I used the single, tenuous thread of the clown to retain my connection. On the surface, a grin never left my face, but on the inside I was locked in a desperate struggle, walking a tightrope, bathed in sweat, the danger of disaster ever imminent as I entertained them.

  From the time I was a child I have had no conception of the suffering of others or what was going through their minds as they went about their lives, even among my own family. Terrified and unable to endure the relentless awkwardness of human interaction, I found that, without realizing it, I had transformed into an accomplished clown. Before I knew it, I had become a child incapable of uttering a single word of truth.

  When I look at my family photographs from that time, everyone is wearing a somber expression, but I alone—without fail—have my face twisted into a peculiar grin. This is one example of my childish, pathetic clowning.

  What’s more, I never talked back when scolded by my parents, not even once. The smallest scolding seemed to me a deafening thunderclap, and it knocked me down with such tremendous force I thought I might go mad. Far from being able to talk back, such scoldings were like the pronouncement of some profound “Truth,” echoing down the generations and across endless ages. Since I lacked the strength to embody that Truth, even at that age, I had already begun to suspect I might be incapable of living among humans. I was incapable of arguing with others, nor could I stand up for myself. If someone criticized me, my first thought was that the other person must be right, utterly and entirely, I must have made a terrible mistake, it couldn’t be clearer. I endured such attacks in meek silence, but on the inside I writhed in agony, near mad with terror.

  Of course, nobody likes being criticized and yelled at, but, in my case, I thought I glimpsed a terrifying animal nature in those angry faces—far more frightening and dreadful than any lion, crocodile, or dragon. Though usually concealed, a fit of rage might suddenly tear away the veil, just as a cow dozing idly in a pasture suddenly cracks its tail, obliterating a horsefly with a single blow. My hair stood on end and a shiver ran down my spine when I thought that possessing this instinct might be a necessary condition for living among humans. I came close to despair.

  I lived in quivering terror of people, and, since I had no confidence whatsoever in my ability to speak or behave like a human being, I gathered up all of my fears and anxieties and concealed them in a box, deep inside my breast. I took enormous pains to conceal my melancholy and nervousness, and devoted myself instead to cultivating an air of innocent good cheer. Thus, little by little, I was transformed into an eccentric clown.

  I would do anything so long as it made people laugh, it didn’t matter what. If I could make them laugh, I reasoned, they might not care that I didn’t really fit into their “lives.” Above all else, I had to avoid sticking out. I had to avoid becoming an eyesore to those human beings. I am nothing, I am the wind, the sky. Such were my thoughts as I strove to entertain my family with my clowning. I played the clown—desperately— even for the maids and servants, as they seemed to me far more incomprehensible and terrifying than my own family.

  Once, at the height of summer, I put a red woolen sweater on under my cotton robe and marched up and down the hallway, making everyone in the house laugh. Even my eldest brother, dour and rarely seen to smile, burst out laughing and, as though he found the sight too delightful for words, called out to me saying, “Really, Yō-chan, I don’t think that suits you.”

  What’s that? I may have played the eccentric but I wasn’t such a fool that I couldn’t tell hot from cold and I certainly wasn’t going to walk around in a wool sweater. I’d taken my sister’s woolen leggings and, pulling them onto my arms, let the ends peek out from my sleeves to make it look like I was wearing a sweater.

/>   My father was often away on business and kept a villa in the Sakuragi district of Ueno, in Tokyo, where he spent the greater part of each month. Whenever he came home he always brought a mountain of presents for the whole family, even bringing some for our distant relatives. I suppose it was a sort of hobby for him.

  Once, before leaving for Tokyo, he gathered all of the children in the parlor and, smiling, asked each of us what we wanted, writing the answers down in his notebook. It was rare for him to be so intimate and friendly with us.

  “And you, Yōzō?”

  With that, I was struck dumb.

  The moment I was asked what I wanted I ceased to want anything at all. What difference did it make? It’s not as though anything could make me happy. At the same time, I was incapable of saying no to anything offered me, no matter how little I might desire it. I could not refuse anything, even if I didn’t like it. If I were being offered something I actually did want I could reach for it only timidly, like a thief fearing discovery, a bitter taste in my mouth as I writhed with indescribable terror. I lacked even the ability to choose one thing over another. I suppose that this failing was one of the causes of what was later to become my “life of shame.”

  I just stood there, squirming silently as Father grew irritated. “A book, I suppose? Or there’s a place in Asakusa that sells lion masks, just like the ones in the New Year’s lion dance—just the size for a child. Would you like one of them?”

  The moment he asked, it was all over. I couldn’t even come up with a silly response. My clowning had utterly failed me.

  “You’d like a book, wouldn’t you?” My eldest brother said, his expression ever serious.

  “I see,” Father said, exasperated. He closed the notebook with a loud snap, not bothering to write anything down.